Escape from India

Escape from India

Janek
was sent to India, for the second time, in 1968. The first time was
as Commercial Counselor with the Polish Embassy, from 1956 to
1960. This time he was there as Westinghouse International's
vice-president for India, Burma, Nepal & (as it was then) Ceylon.
He ran a small office, with a secretary and a couple of staff,
and spent a great deal of time on the road, visiting various
Westinghouse offices and projects around the subcontinent. This
Westinghouse was not the one that people associate with toasters
and air conditioners - it was the heavy industry branch of the
company. They built hydroelectric generators and desalinization
plants and when we traveled as a family, we seemed to stop to
visit an inordinate number of dams.

Life in India the second
time was good. We started off living in a luxury hotel - the Oberoi
Intercontinental, with a fabulous pool where Jan loved to swim
and befriended many other expats and the airline crews who were
always passing through. In late fall, Janek and Wanda moved into a
gorgeous white mansion at 4A Maharani Bagh in a brand new development
on the southern outskirts of the city. There were a living room,
a dining room, two smaller rooms (each with its own bathroom)
which became his and her studies, a kitchen with a walk-in pantry, a
small "powder room" for guests off a huge centre hall
with a curved wrought iron staircase leading to three bedrooms,
each also with its own bathroom - six bathrooms in all, for two
people. White marble floors throughout. A veranda that ran the
length of the house off the master bedroom, and below along the
living room. And servant quarters above the garage. There was James
the bearer (or butler), Cook the cook, and a sweeper, a
low-caste Indian who did all the nasty jobs James and Cook
refused to do because of their status. In addition, there was the
mali, or gardener, who came every few days; as did the dhobi, or
laundry man, and a night watchman who stood guard from sunset to
sunrise. There were two cars – an Australian white Ford
Fairlane sedan and an Indian-made Ambassador car, both of which
were luxuries in a country where the waiting list for an automobile
for the average person was seven years. And, of course, a driver to
negotiate Delhi's chaotic traffic of cars, overloaded buses,
horse carts, three-wheeled scooter taxis, dogs, cows, pedestrians,
none of whom seemed to register that there were such things as rules
of the road.I left Delhi in June 1969, after finishing high
school, and left Janek and Wanda to their six bathrooms,
innumerable servants, and hectic social life of cocktails and dinner
parties. They had a lot of friends, especially among the European
and American diplomatic corps, as well as some old Indian friends
from their first tour with the Polish legation. Janek worked
(including travel), Wanda played tennis and bridge. The "white"
transient population in Delhi had enormous privilege and, in a
caste society where status is determined by skin colour, was held in
high esteem. It also didn’t hurt that US dollars went a long
way in rupees.

The
country was governed by the Congress Party, with founding father
Jawarhalal Nehru’s daughter Indira Ghandi as Prime Minister
since 1966. Things were initially stable for the most part. Gandhi
followed a leftist philosophy inherited from her socialist
father, including a policy in 1969 of land reform, and ceilings
on personal income, private property, and corporate profits. She
also nationalized the major banks, which put her at odds with the
rest of her party. There was growing nationalistic unrest in the
Punjab, with a secession movement brewing. She went to war
against Pakistan in 1971 (and won) and expelled 10 million
Bangladeshi refugees. These things made her popular with
ordinary Indians but raised the ire of various special interest
groups.Then things turned for the worse: there were crop failures
in 1972 and 1973, and skyrocketing world oil prices. Mrs.
Gandhi's rule was challenged by railroad employees’ strikes, a
national civil disobedience campaign, an all-party, no-confidence
motion in Parliament against her, and, finally, a legal judgment
that declared her 1971 election win invalid and barred her from
taking her seat for six years.

Janek signing an agreement for a new sugar refinery

Janek on an elephant hunt

Indira Ghandi

On
June 25, 1975, Mrs. Gandhi declared a State of Emergency and the
government suspended civil rights. She pushed through amendments
to the constitution that exonerated her from any culpability, and
jailed thousands of her opponents.

None of this had any
immediate effect on Jan or his work. Until, that is, she
decided to expand her nationalization efforts to include all the
foreign firms in India. Congress made it a condition of doing
business in the country that a company would have to cede a 51%
share to Mrs. Gandhi's government. Needless to say, this did not
win her any friends among the international business community.
One by one, international firms simply closed their offices and
withdrew. Coca Cola was one – after that, you couldn’t get a
Coke in India for at least a decade. When she realized her scheme
had backfired, she decided on a bold move: take hostages.

She
thought by sending American businessmen to jail, their home offices
would hastily see things her way and hand over the controlling
shares to win their employees' freedom. She miscalculated. Much
to Janek's cost.

He was arrested on trumped up charges of
"corruption" - there may indeed have been a few bribes
involved, but that was the cost of doing business in a very corrupt
country. There was even an article in the national slander sheet,
Blitz, accusing him of paying out millions. As if. He was taken
from the mansion in Maharani Bagh to Tihar Prison. I don't know the
details of the story: was he handcuffed? Was he allowed to call a
lawyer? All I do know is he spent a miserable night in a cell.
Typical of Janek, even that turned into a great story. In the cell
next door was Charles Sobhraj,a notorious French-Vietnamese jewel
thief and serial killer who was in Tihar for the poisoning death
one of his robbery victims. Janek realized Sobhraj was living well
on the inside - he had personal servants and food brought in from
outside. What he didn't know at the time was that Sobhraj had
smuggled jewels into the prison and used them to attain rajah status
among the inmates.

Janek’s stay in Delhi’s underworld was
brief, but there was more to follow. And it was a shock:
Westinghouse flat out abandoned him. Their response to Mrs.
Gandhi was essentially: “Do whatever you want. He doesn’t
work for us.” And while the “legal” proceedings were underway –presumably there was to be a trial – Janek was forbidden to
leave India. He would have needed an exit visa, which was
denied.

He was not the only one in this situation. The head of
Goodyear suffered a similar fate. And was the oppressive
atmosphere in Delhi that his Indian friends stopped taking his
calls. I can only imagine Wanda’s response to all this, given
her history in German-occupied Poland and her days under
Stalinism. Somehow, entirely to his credit, he managed to persuade
the authorities to let her go. Oh, and take all their belongings
with her. As soon as possible, she left for Virginia, where Adam
and Lucy had settled.

Janek was stuck in India alone
indefinitely. But he was not without his resources. Among their
American friends was a couple named Arthur and Jean Reppun. They
worked for Pan American airlines in Delhi. Jean, I think, was
Australian (one of them was). Through them, Janek contacted
Julek. And asked to borrow his passport.

Julek later told me
that the Djament brothers spent a lot of time saving Janek’s ass
when they were growing up. But as soon as the request came in,
Julek was there for his younger brother. He “lost” his
passport, which in fact he handed over to Jean to smuggle back to
India. And to make Janek’s Ozziness more convincing, he sent
along a traditional khaki bush hat.

Janek thought he and Julek
looked sufficiently alike – balding, blue-eyed, only two years
apart in age – that he took the chance of passing himself off
as his own brother. He boarded a bus in Delhi and spent about two
horrifying bumpy and noisy days travelling through the Punjab,
probably passing through the Sikh holy city of Amritsar (where
Mrs. Gandhi didn’t have many friends) and crossing the border
into Pakistan. Julek’s passport, and the hat that partially
obscured his face worked like a charm; no one at the border post
thought to wonder why a 62-year-old white man was riding the
people’s express, and they waved him through.

From there, he
went to Lahore, which is a major Pakistani city and caught a plane.
He was gone. Never to return.

Back in New York, he needed
to settle his affairs. Westinghouse reached a deal with him: let’s
call it an early retirement, shall we? He didn’t have much
choice. He could have launched a lawsuit against the company for
abandoning him in such an ignoble way. But he wasn’t young, and
he certainly did not have deep enough pockets to go against their
lawyers. So he accepted a pension and signed all the papers. And
then went down to the D.C. area to join his beloved Wanda. They
bought a house in Fairfax, Virginia, and lived there for more than
twenty years, during which time he was mostly depressed and
certainly soured on the idea of American corporate loyalty.Janek
had proven once again that he was an escape artist: he had escaped
Hitler, he had escaped Stalin, and now he had escaped Indira
Gandhi.